Original Source:
Hello dr. peterson thank you very much and my question is regarding adhd which is something i haven’t heard you speak a whole lot about maybe a little bit now it seems to me that we or at least maybe just me do not quite understand adhd – what could be its full capacity maybe and because there’s many many voices saying that it’s an over diagnosed overblown small
Mental variance that’s prevalent in boys or it’s just young boys being young boys and then there are some that would fight and advocate for very different treatment in the academic world and i was wondering what you what your thoughts are on adhd itself and on the whether you think it’s over diagnosed and maybe advice for me as someone who has been diagnosed with
Adhd on how to overcome it without maybe becoming completely reliant on prescribed medication okay so first of all it’s definitely over diagnosed second it’s it’s a very unreliable psychiatric diagnosis many psychiatric diagnosis are unreliable and that’s because psychiatric diagnosis aren’t precisely scientific categories they’re weird hybrids right first of all
Psychiatrists aren’t scientists they’re engineers engineers are trying to do something rather than to describe the objective world and psychiatrists are trying to make people healthy whatever that means it’s actually partly ethical it’s very complicated we don’t know how to distinguish it from temperamental variation so for example if you’re high in openness and
High in extraversion and low in conscientiousness low in agreeableness conscientiousness and and high in neuroticism you’re likely to manifest symptoms of adhd it’s because you’re exploratory you don’t like to sit down you’re full of ideas your attention scatters across a wide variety of topics and you’re not very stable temperamental variation it’s also much more
Common among boys panksepp showed same guy with rats that if you deprive young routes of rough-and-tumble play which is what the young boys are deprived of in school let’s say that they get hyperactive and then their prefrontal cortexes don’t develop very well because they’re not having the right kind of experiences and that you can treat that quite effectively
With psychomotor stimulants like ritalin so that’s kind of an interesting bit of scientific information that no one pays any attention to there is also absolutely no evidence whatsoever that long-term use of psychomotor stimulants produces increases in cognitive gaining zero and there’s plenty of evidence that it’s harmful so then the second part of that was
What about adjustments for in the academic world say we disability adjustments it’s like that’s a such a rat’s nest that i don’t want to even discuss it i mean it it i’ll discuss it for like 15 seconds there is a never-ending multiplication of disabilities that’s what’s happening right now the disability offices and the universities are swamped like i know some
People have it rough like believe me i know that i was a problem i seriously know that i’ve dealt with extraordinarily damaged people in my life here you’re bloody hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t have a serious problem or who doesn’t have a serious problem in a close family member it’s like where do you draw the line with regards to disabilities well you
Can’t you can’t they multiply just like lgbt identities multiply just no really technically just like that just like intersectionality categories of oppression multiply it’s it’s it’s inevitable the way that you deal with it is you have objective standards you apply them to everyone not because that’s fair it’s not fair if you if your criteria for fairness is
That everyone has the same come it’s not fair at all it’s not even close to fair it’s just less tyrannical than the alternatives now we don’t know that yet because we haven’t seen the full range of the tyranny of the alternatives manifest itself not in our culture but it certainly did in other cultures i think it’s a bad idea now i don’t want to be absolute about
That like it’s tricky you know because if you have a disability that would allow you to do the work in the university and in the workplace with a modification then perhaps the modification could be made but i think that was done a lot better when that was in the hands of the professor’s and not in the hands of these crazy bureaucratic structures that have risen
Up around the disability issue like they’re one of the ten things that are going to kill the universities or maybe you’ve already killed them possibly because they mean they’re walking corpses as far as i can tell zombies so and that might be wrong but it’s what it looks like to me
Transcribed from video
Jordan Peterson – ADHD By Rational Philosophy
